I kicked it out of frustration. Another appliance ruined by Russian hackers. I reset my wifi password and suddenly the clanking stopped. The lid eventually unlocked once the spinning slowed down. I opened it.

The wooden chest was bound in leather and etched with mystical symbols. The lock was sharp black metal and did not match the ancient figure work on the wood and leather. While those lines were flowing and shapely, the lock was plain and even unbeautiful.

I squinted through the scope again. They all seemed differently shaped. Arms and legs in a random assortment of configurations. Bodies of smooth black plastic. Weapons in place of their head.

How strange would it be if, overnight, the ocean was filled with mercury. Would anything survive? I can’t imagine that liquid metal could be oxygenated the same way that water can.

The sightings came few and far between, but the bodies turned up regularly. A farmer would go missing. The search party would set out. They would find the body, terribly mangled, deep in the jungle. The clock would reset and then they would bide their time until the next killing.

We (it used to be we) had built our cabin far up in the pine woods. I could breathe easy up there, and it was always quiet for her painting. Slowly the car stopped working, and then her painting stopped. That’s when I knew it was bad.

We bounced and jolted our way over the rough, pot-hole-riddled dirt roads, then splashed through the shallow spot in the river. The dogs were loving it, and kept knocking around in the back as they play-fought each other.

I gently and politely elbowed my way through the crowd towards my platform. The mix of languages around me covered almost every continent in the space of fifty feet. I pulled my headphones from my briefcase and tuned out from the busyness around me.

My body was tired but my mind was racing with possibilities. I pulled up to a stoplight on the edge of town. A pair of headlights pulled up behind me with uncanny menace. There was something aggressive about the way they stopped; sudden and just a little too close behind me.

There was a tab of acid or something leftover from last night. I was so tired and bored rolling up hundreds of balls of dough that I didn’t even care what it was. I took it… it definitely wasn’t acid. I had never had anything like this before…

I clutched at my stomach. In stark contrast to the perfect surroundings, I felt as though I was filled with everything that was most horrible in the world. I had been in agony ever since I ate the pâté on the plane. Nobody else had had an issue (I asked) so I began to wonder if it was the food or if I had simply come down with a bug.

The air cushioned me and that perfect feeling of weightlessness settled in. I grinned as I rolled and spun in the air. The horizon swung in and out of view, and the earth below somehow remained distant even as I raced towards it. I checked my altimeter. It was time to slow my descent.

Jupiter loomed somewhere overhead. I could tell from the shadow, even if I couldn’t see through all the flying ice chips. I fought to put one foot in front of the other. I turned the corner of the barracks and saw an enormous shape looming above the generator. The darkness, the wind, the icy hail… it could have been a hallucination, but I was sure.

Then I realized what it was: every street smelled the same. Clean, but with undertones of damp concrete, slightly burnt cooking oil, and gasoline.

Then the air raid siren started blaring. The boys on the beach scrambled ashore while I watched. There must have been head winds for the planes to be so early. The fighters and bombers roared overhead moments later, ripping into the anti-aircraft guns and the ammunition depot. A door opened softly behind me.

My ruckus must have made those ponies turn sour somehow. All of a sudden they start pawing and stamping at me, working up the courage, testing me and forcing me backwards. Before I knew it one was running headlong at me.

There must have been a malfunction in the control unit. How else could so many systems bust themselves up at once? I had read stories of submariners trapped on the ocean floor when their ballast tanks stopped working. Our tin can was billions of dollars more expensive and yet the feeling of helplessness felt exactly the same.

My knife, perhaps more than myself, would play the true lead role. I wouldn’t last as long as either the blade or the results of my heroic deed. I eyed my target. She was delicately featured—a deceptive biological fact. Her slight form cloaked her obsession with brutalizing her political adversaries until they were driven to hire women like me to do what words could not.

We were at a jogging pace, closing the distance with light hearts. Our archers set forth a spray of twinkling death into the morning sky. The arrows flashed red in the rising sun, then plunged into the enemy. I could see their faces and hear their anguish. We began to run.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. I rolled from my hammock onto the cool wood of the deck. My eyes had adjusted to the dark so I made my way to the stairs without much trouble, even though it was pitch black in the crew quarters. What I saw above on deck was even stranger than I could have imagined.